Materials for Inspectors

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Rapport:Rapport in language learning refers to the relationship between the teacher and the learners. Teachers try to build good rapport with the learners.A good rapport between teacher and students and between students contributes to an environment that will help learning.

Rate of Acquisition: The speed at which the learner develops L2 proficiency. This is different to the 'route of acquisition'.

Rating scale:A rating scale is a scale against which a learner's performance is assessed, producing a quantifiable result. The rater is usually trained in applying the scale before they rate real samples of language.

Realia: Realia are real things that are brought to the class and used as a resource.A teacher working with beginners on food lexis might bring in authentic examples of food such as garlic, an apple, a pear, a carrot, etc to show students.Realia is an extremely efficient way to clarify meaning.

Real-life Communication: This is the kind of communication activity people engage in outside the classroom in the real-world.

Real-world Tasks: These are tasks based on authentic materials and situations. Learners are required to approximate, in class, the sorts of behaviors required of them in the world beyond the classroom. See Pedagogic Tasks.

Receptive Skills: The receptive skills are listening and reading.Learners do not need to produce language when they listen and read; instead they receive and understand it. These skills are sometimes called the passive skills, and they can be contrasted with theproductive, or active, skills of speaking and writing.

Receptive Use:It is sometimes important to differentiate between the English that our students need to be able to understand when they hear or read it, and the English students need to be able to use when they speak or write.Using English to listen or read is called receptive or passive use.English can be used receptively and productively at the same time.For example, in a conversation, people listen (receptive use) and then speak (productive use).

Recycling: Recycling involves learners’ practicing language which they have been exposed to previously. It is very unusual for anyone to learn anything after only one exposure to it, and recycling helps students remember and internalize the language and so is an essential part of the learning process. The recycled language is often re-introduced in a different context, or through a different skill. This helps the student extend their range of use of the new item.

Referential questions: Referential questions are questions people ask when they do not know the answer. In an ELT classroom, referential questions can be questions teachers ask learners and learners ask each other. Referential questions can be compared to display questions, which are questions teachers ask even though the answer is already clear, and teachers ask just to see if the learners know the answer, or in order to give students practice manipulating the language.

Register:A register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.For example, the register of parents talking to their young children is quite different from the register of employers talking to their employees.Talking to employees in the same way that one normally talks to young children is usually considered inappropriate.

Reliable:This term is used to talk about tests and test results.A test is considered reliable if it gives consistent results when it is given at different times to different groups of people.

Retention: Retention of (new) language means remembering the language rather than forgetting it. Once a word is retained, it can be retrieved and used later.

Retrieval: Retrieval is the action of recalling (remembering) and using language stored in long-term memory.

Roleplay:In a roleplay, students are asked to act out a particular transaction in a particular role.Students can roleplay ordering food in a restaurant, asking directions on the street, or interviewing a famous football (soccer) player or musician.Roleplays are usually used to practice language that students already know (semi-controlled oral practice) or sometimes used to practice the skill of speaking (fluency speaking practice).Students decide what they are going to say with or without help from the teacher. If the teacher limits students’ choice of language to use, the roleplay is a practice activity; if students are free to choose what they will say, the roleplay is a fluency activity.Reading a dialog aloud is not a roleplay because students have no choice about what to say.Before doing a roleplay, students need to understand clearly what the situation and roles are, and to have preparation time to think about what they are going to say.Roleplays should be realistic, interesting, and require genuine communication.

Route of Development: L2 learners go through a number of transitional states en route to acquiring target language rules. This is referred to as the 'route of development.’

Routines: These are a type of formulaic speech. They are units that are learnt and used as wholes, for example, "I don't know” “How awful!” “Thank you very much” and “the thing is…” See Formulaic Speech and Patterns.

Rubric:Rubrics are the marking standards used to assess communicative tasks such as essays, posters, presentations, letters and interviews.A rubric is composed of characteristics of the task being assessed and a scale that rates the quality of the characteristics from low to high.For example, a rubric for a written essay might include these four characteristics:organization, appropriateness of content, grammatical accuracy and range of vocabulary.The characteristics might be rated along four levels:excellent, good, adequate, needs improvement.